Transgender Invisibility in Namibian and South African LGBT Organizing

©2015 Feminist Formations, Vol. 27 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 91–117

Transgender Invisibility in Namibian and South African LGBT Organizing

Ashley Currier

The meanings of transgender invisibility in Namibian and South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements differ from those in LGBT movements in the United States. LGBT activists in Namibia and South Africa voluntarily included transgender rights and persons in the movement beginning in the mid-1990s, yet few constituents identified as transgender. Transgender invisibility in these movements indicates the discrepancy between collective and lived personal identities. Drawing on ethnographic observation of Namibian and South African LGBT activist organizations in 2005–06 and fifty-six interviews with LGBT activ-ists, the article analyzes the contours of transgender invisibility within the Namibian and South African LGBT movements. A focus on transgender invisibility in LGBT movement organizations in Namibia and South Africa illuminates the uneven reception of identity terms and the identity work that LGBT activists in southern Africa perform to encourage constituents to align personal identities with prevailing collective-identity terms.

Keywords: collective identity / invisibility / LGBT movements / Namibia / South Africa / transgender

Understanding transgender invisibility and inclusion in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements requires acknowledging how collective-identity processes within LGBT movements diverge in the global North and South.1 For instance, lesbian and gay activists in Namibia and South Africa voluntarily included transgender rights and persons in the LGBT movements beginning in the mid-1990s. Transgender activists in Namibia and South Africa did not mobilize publicly to demand incorporation into lesbian and gay move-ment organizations at this time. Lesbian and gay activists in Namibia and South

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92 · Feminist Formations 27.1

Africa enacted this inclusion willingly, adopting the LGBT acronym in their public visibility strategies. I use the term LGBT activist to refer to an individual who advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. Although most LGBT activists identified as lesbian or gay, many leaders did not view personal identification as a gender or sexual minority as a prerequisite for movement participation. As such, transgender invisibility resulted from the absence of transgender-identified constituents, but activists remained committed to the principle of transgender inclusion.

Namibian and South African LGBT organizing emerged in distinct socio-political environments, resulting in activists’ selection of different strategies (Currier 2012b). To understand the contours of Namibian and South African LGBT activist organizations’ visibility strategies, I observed the meetings and activities of four LGBT movement organizations in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Windhoek, Namibia, and interviewed fifty-six Namibian and South African LGBT activists in 2005 and 2006. After the transition away from apartheid rule, South African LGBT movement organizations benefited from few political constraints on their public visibility, due in part to the support for LGBT rights expressed by key leaders in the ruling African National Congress (Croucher 2011). In contrast, Namibian LGBT movement organizations struggled to maintain their public visibility in a sociopolitical environment in which state leaders deployed political homophobia and claimed that homosexuality was “un-African” (Currier 2010, 2012b; Lorway 2008). Despite these differences, Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations upheld a principle of inclusion that stemmed from lessons they learned from South African apart-heid rule. Activists were keen not to enact exclusions based on gender variance that echoed the racial and economic marginalization codified by South African apartheid rule (Currier 2010). The practice of including transgender persons and rights unfolded organically in response to local conditions producing racial, class, gender, and sexual injustices and mirrored developments in international LGBT movement organizations that included transgender rights (Blackwood 2008; Ndashe 2011).

The relationship between transgender invisibility and inclusion in LGBT organizing in the United States differed from that in Namibia and South Africa. Some transgender activists attribute past transgender invisibility in US lesbian and gay organizing to concerted efforts by activists to exclude trans-gender persons and grievances (Ghaziani 2008). Beginning in the late 1980s, transgender activists demanded incorporation into lesbian and gay organizing, which some lesbian and gay activists resisted (Valentine 2007). While lesbian and gay activists argued for barring transgender activists from lesbian and gay organizing, the same activists pressed heterosexist social institutions to accept sexual minorities—a contradiction that exposed lesbian and gay activists’ “hypocrisy,” according to transgender activists (Armstrong 2002, 179).2 For some US lesbian and gay activists, transgender inclusion threatened to undermine

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Ashley Currier · 93

the movement’s clear-cut promotion of sexual-minority rights (Gamson 1995). When lesbian and gay activists moved to integrate transgender persons and rights into the movement, some interpreted this inclusion as an “instrumental” attempt to appease aggrieved transgender constituents, and to signify activists’ dedication to representing diversity, including racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversity—a move that seemed hollow to some (Ward 2008, 6).

In contrast, Namibian and South African activists defended transgender inclusion in the LGBT movement during 2005–06 against critics who opined that transgender visibility obscured demands for sexual-minority rights (Cur-rier 2010, 2012c). An example of activists’ allegiance to transgender inclusion occurred in February 2006, when representatives from Namibian, South Afri-can, and Zimbabwean LGBT movement organizations met in Johannesburg to discuss how to present a pan-African LGBT movement to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR).3 At the behest of the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), south-ern African activists gathered to develop strategic priorities for an emerging African LGBT movement. One meeting attendee suggested that the African LGBT activist contingent to the ACHPR should omit transgender activists because their presence might divert attention from sexual-minority human rights violations and unnerve commissioners unfamiliar with lived gender diversity. Most activists disagreed with this recommendation. Southern African LGBT activists supported inviting transgender activists if they could identify individuals willing to participate publicly as transgender persons; they wor-ried that they would not be able to locate transgender activists because so few southern Africans personally and publicly identified as transgender. LGBT activists were not alone in expressing worry about the perceived invisibility of transgender-identified Africans; HIV/AIDS activists have registered similar concerns about the absence of transgender Africans from HIV/AIDS education, prevention, and treatment initiatives (Jobson, Theron, Kaggwa, and Kim 2012).

Although Namibian and South African LGBT activists publicly endorsed transgender inclusion, they expressed concern about the absence of transgender-identified constituents in the mid-2000s. Some activists believed that once transgender-identified constituents joined the movement, not only could activists claim them as members and supporters, but they could also cite their presence as evidence of the movement’s commitment to racial, class, and gender inclusivity, an important development in two countries still struggling to rectify colonial- and apartheid-era injustices. Drawing on original ethnographic observation that I conducted with Namibian and South African LGBT activist organizations during 2005–06, I analyze transgender invisibility within the Namibian and South African LGBT movements and explore the normalizing consequences that accompanied the “transgender visibility” that activists tried to produce. The discrepancy between collective and personal identities contributed to transgender invisibility in Namibian and South African LGBT organizing.

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Gender and Sexual Identities in Social Movements

Social movements transform how activists and constituents understand their identities. Collective identities typically arise organically from activists’ experi-ences, desires, emotions, and beliefs (Polletta and Jasper 2001; Taylor and Whit-tier 1992). When potential activists explore whether collective action is possible, they bond over their common experiences and shared social and political cri-tiques. Over time, activists strengthen collective understandings of “we-ness,” usually by delineating outsider/insider boundaries (Snow and McAdam 2000, 42). From these collective deliberations, identity convergence—the correlation of personal and collective identities—sometimes occurs (Stoecker 1995, 114). Lesbian and gay organizing in the United States realigned many constituents’ personal identities, resulting in identity coherence and convergence. Before joining a lesbian and gay movement organization, many lesbians and gay men named and articulated their same-sex sexual desires, sometimes in a circumspect manner. After joining a lesbian and gay movement organization, these new recruits became emboldened to proclaim their personal sexual identity in an act of collective solidarity, resulting in the convergence of their personal and collective identities (Armstrong 2002). David Snow and Doug McAdam (2000, 51–52) label the process of individual activists’ revision of personal identities so that they align with movements’ collective identities as “identity transfor-mation.” Like identity convergence, identity transformation falls under a larger umbrella of identity work, the intentional meaning-making in which movement adherents engage (Reger, Myers, and Einwohner 2008).

A different kind of identity work was unfolding in Namibian and South African LGBT movements during the period of my ethnographic observation in the mid-2000s. Activists encouraged gender and sexually diverse constituents to embrace lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender collective identities as personal identities.4 In social movement studies parlance, this type of identity work was not strictly “identity transformation”; within processes of identity transformation, individual recruits and activists initiate and execute identity realignment in a bottom-up process (Gamson 1996, 237). Within Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations, more senior activists instigated the realignment of new constituents’ personal identities with collective identities, a process that occurred in a top-down hierarchical manner within the movement organiza-tion (ibid.). In a sense, senior activists participated in “manufacturing” LGBT constituents. Nevertheless, their success in convincing particular gender and sexual dissidents to adopt collective identities as personal identities was uneven.

Constituents’ acceptance of LGBT collective identities as personal identi-ties in Namibia and South Africa was not uniform for several reasons. First, many constituents did not use these terms, in part because English was not their first or second language. To foster constituents’ use of these terms, some LGBT movement organizations sponsored “ ‘sexuality training’ workshops” in

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which they taught constituents about these terms, often in conjunction with discussions of indigenous sexuality terms (Lorway 2008, 25). Graeme Reid (2013) characterizes this approach in South African rural and urban areas as teaching constituents “how to be gay.” Second, in these workshops and other actions, Namibian and South African LGBT activists assumed the distinctiveness and separability of LGBT identity terms from one another: one was either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Rarely would organizations sanction individuals’ combination of identity terms, such as a transgender lesbian or transgender bisex-ual person. Finally, lesbian- and gay-identity terms gained traction among gender and sexual-minority constituents and cultural recognition with Namibian and South Africans, relegating bisexual- and transgender-identity terms to secondary positions within the movement (Dirsuweit 2006; Stobie 2007). Bisexual- and transgender-identity terms were not widely popular among gender and sexual minorities as personal identities in these countries during the period of my ethnographic observation of activist organizations. This is evident in Robert Lorway’s (2008, 2014) study of Namibian LGBT organizing. When he asked a respondent whom LGBT activists had labeled as a “female transgender” if he identified as transgender, the respondent stated that he was not “transgender,” but a “lesbian” who preferred masculine pronouns (29–30).

The uneven reception of LGBT collective identities as personal identi-ties, particularly transgender identities, is not limited to LGBT organizing in southern Africa. David Valentine (2007) recognizes the variation in how gender-diverse persons in the United States embrace transgender to describe themselves. One male-bodied study participant’s simultaneous seizure of woman and gay identities indicates the possibilities that the “categories of both trans-gender and homosexual [are] equivalent categories of personhood” for some constituents (4; emphasis in original). The concomitant seizure of gender- and sexual-minority-identity categories confounds the logic that LGBT identities are separable and mutually exclusive. For some constituents in Namibia and South Africa, lesbian and gay already represented the lived gender diversity that activists intended transgender to capture, even for who those had participated as LGBT movement activists for some time. They were not going to identify as transgender. Their preference for lesbian- and gay-identity categories contrib-uted to the gap between collective and personal identities in these movements. Much like one of Valentine’s study participants, some participants in Reid’s (2013) study of Black South African gay communities understood themselves as ladies, not as gay or men. Similarly, some female-bodied, masculine lesbians in Namibia who belong to the Damara ethnic group identified as men though not transgender; their lesbian identity buttressed their claims to masculinity (|Khaxas 2005).

The emergence of “global gay”–identity formations has been the subject of much criticism (Altman 1997; Binnie 2004; King 2002; Phillips 2000). The global gay–identity model refers to the transnational dispersion of Western gay

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identities and culture. Transnational circuits for Western gay identities and culture include gay tourism to locales in the global South marketed as “exotic” (Puar 2001); international LGBT movement organizations and activist confer-ences (Drucker 1996; Thoreson 2012); and print, radio, televisual, and internet media that feature content about Western lesbian and gay lives (Howe 2008). The supremacy of global gay–identity formations—the transnational promi-nence of Western LGBT terminology, in particular—threatens to homogenize gender and sexual-minority experiences in the global North and South, and efface indigenous sexualities and desires by flattening them into culturally interchangeable LGBT-identity terms (Epprecht 2008; Hemmings 2007; Hoad 2007; Katyal 2002). Feminist and queer theorists urge caution about applying Western categories that may be “incomplete, inapplicable, or even offensive depending on contexts and histories” to nonheteronormative gender and sexual practices in the global South (Swarr and Nagar 2003, 514).

Although the concerns voiced by transnational sexuality studies scholars are valid, they neither reflect how identity diffusion and reception occurs in nations in the global South nor explain how local LGBT movements activate these identity processes. Viewing transgender invisibility in some Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations as stemming from the gap between collective and personal identities constitutes an important interven-tion in debates about the transnational diffusion of lesbian and gay identities. This approach recognizes how identity strategies unfold differently in gender and sexuality movements around the world, acknowledges how LGBT activists throughout the world exercise agency in determining whether they will use or modify these terms, and resists monolithic assumptions about how activists should engage in identity work. Namibian and South African LGBT activ-ists pursued identity work usually in English, a language of (neo)colonialism. LGBT activist leaders traveled overseas, collaborated with international LGBT movement organizations, such as IGLHRC and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA), and exchanged ideas with activists around the world. Social movement scholars typify such exchanges among activists as “brokerage,” a “transnational hinge that communicates and adapts an external practice to new sites and situations” (Tarrow 2005, 190; see also Thoreson 2012). Acting as brokers, activist leaders were in key positions to reorient movement organizations. Namibian and South African LGBT activists’ use of LGBT collective identities enhanced their access to donors, diplomats, and international LGBT NGOs, and funding from Northern donors.

Routine use of the LGBT acronym conditioned activists to treat identity categories as separable and mutually exclusive. Following leaders’ examples, Namibian and South African LGBT activists accepted that their movement organizations emphasized work around sexual diversity and separated gender from sexuality in their campaigns. Evidenced by the absence of conversations about identity terminology, activists did not regard debating the distinction

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between gender and sexuality as necessary. In some movement organizations, activists invite spirited deliberation that is consistent with their ethos of demo-cratic engagement. However, as Kathleen Blee’s (2012) research on the origins of different US social movement groups shows, some fledgling activist groups quickly settle into a pattern of discouraging democratic deliberation. In several activist groups that she studied, activists believed that prolonged deliberation would prevent the group from taking action, such as mobilizing people for a protest, which would yield immediate, tangible rewards. Even in feminist, queer, and indigenous activist organizations that profess a commitment to democratic practices, activists move to cultivate professionalism and routines within organi-zations, thus constraining the actions that these organizations can take in the future (Bumiller 2008; Hodgson 2011; Ward 2008). In groups with noticeably dysfunctional dynamics, activists may not interrogate the organizations’ direc-tion and management, but instead accept the existing organizational culture and political priorities (Blee 2012). Although the Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations that I observed did not suffer from such dynam-ics, activists involved with these organizations did not question organizational priorities. In particular, LGBT activists accepted the division between gender and sexuality and the fact that their group worked primarily on sexual diversity; they did not initiate discussions that probed the finer points of the relationship between gender and sexuality. Thus, activists deployed the LGBT collective-identity framework embraced by their predecessors.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations and interviews with LGBT activists during 2005–06, I analyze LGBT constituents’ reception of transgender collective iden-tity. First, transgender identification was invisible because some constituents understood themselves through locally prominent gender and sexual categories, such as “lesbian men” (|Khaxas 2005, 149). For some activists and constituents, the terms in the LGBT acronym were not separable; instead, some identity terms, such as gay and lesbian, operated as both gender and sexual categories. Second, activists engaged in identity work intended to generate social and political accep-tance for LGBT Namibians and South Africans, and to encourage constituents to use these terms when articulating their personal identities. In the absence of autonomous transgender organizing, LGBT activists, many of whom did not identify as transgender, assumed responsibility for generating discourse about transgender issues and grievances (Dirsuweit 2006; Swarr 2009, 2012b). Speak-ing for as-yet invisible transgender constituents whom LGBT activists assumed would eventually populate the movement can narrow and normalize discourses about transgender identities and persons, thus limiting successive action on and discourse about transgender grievances. A focus on transgender invisibility in LGBT movement organizations in Namibia and South Africa illuminates the identity work that LGBT activists performed to encourage constituents to align their personal identities with prevailing collective-identity terms.

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Data and Methods

I base this article on ethnographic and interview data I collected in Namibia and South Africa. Ethnographic observation is helpful for generating insights concerning social movements and processes about which scholars know little (Lichterman 1998). I engaged in approximately 800 hours of intensive ethno-graphic observation at two LGBT movement organizations in Johannesburg (September 2005 through mid-April 2006) and two in Windhoek, Namibia (mid-April–July 2006) for several hours during each weekday. The four LGBT movement organizations I studied included: Behind the Mask (Johannesburg), an organization that monitored media reporting about LGBT issues within South Africa and on the continent; the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW, Johannesburg), a Black lesbian organization working to eliminate vio-lence against Black lesbians; Sister Namibia (Windhoek), a feminist organiza-tion that supports LGBT rights; and The Rainbow Project (TRP, Windhoek), a national LGBT movement organization. However, due to the lack of external funding, staff and volunteers had to close Behind the Mask and TRP. When I observed them, the organizations conducted most of their work in English and targeted state and social institutions as audiences. All organizations relied upon external funding from Northern donors to support paid staff positions and to cover the costs of renting office space and services for constituents, rendering LGBT movement organizations dependent on material aid from the global North.

My data also come from fifty-six interviews I conducted with the lead-ers, staff, and constituents of Behind the Mask, FEW, Sister Namibia, and TRP. After I became familiar with the organizations’ rhythms and routines, I interviewed leaders, staff, and members in English about their respective orga-nization’s strategies and styles. I interviewed only individuals who had been employed by or involved with the organization for more than six months. I refrained from asking questions that would stir up emotional trauma for activists, such as asking them to discuss their relationships with their families or their experiences with violence. The feminist practice of esteeming women’s and gender and sexual minorities’ experiences and knowledge guided my interviews (Taylor 1998). I treated interview respondents as experts on LGBT organizing and assigned all respondents pseudonyms in keeping with qualitative research ethics (Piper and Simons 2005).

After arriving in Johannesburg and Windhoek, I identified several activ-ist organizations that were eligible for the study. An archivist at the Gay and Lesbian Archives, which is now named Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action, suggested that I look into Behind the Mask and FEW because these were publicly observable organizations serving LGBT constituents in the Johan-nesburg metropolitan area. First, I met with the director of Behind the Mask and explained my interest in observing the organization’s daily activities and

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meetings, interviewing staff members, and consulting the organization’s records, and the director granted me permission to begin observing the organization the next day. A few months later, I met separately with the directors of Sister Namibia and TRP when they were in Johannesburg for the IGLHRC meeting, and they agreed to let me observe their organizations. Although the directors of Behind the Mask, Sister Namibia, and TRP did not regard my outsider status as a white middle-class, educated woman researcher from the United States as a potential problem for their staff or constituents, the director of FEW probed my interest in following her organization. She expressed concerns about foreign journalists and researchers exploiting Black lesbians’ stories of anti-lesbian rape and violence. After I provided the director with a description of the nature of my ethnographic observation, we met several times over a few weeks and discussed my project’s parameters. I clarified that I wanted to document FEW’s strategies and activities through ethnographic observation, interviews with staff, activists, and constituents, and examination of organizational records. I stressed that my interview questions would remain confined to research participants’ views about FEW. When the director inquired about my sexual identity, I stated that I identified as bisexual, and my response relieved her because she viewed me as invested in LGBT movement priorities. She granted me access to FEW’s events and meetings and allowed me to use FEW’s space for conducting interviews.

My presence puzzled some LGBT activists initially, but as I continued to show up at an organization’s office, most people adjusted to my presence. In fact, some visitors openly discussed my physical appearance, speculating about whether my gender presentation and behavior indicated that I identified as “butch” or “femme.” While I was in the field, I wore no makeup, kept my hair cut short, and dressed in informal attire, preferring comfortable, casual clothing and athletic shoes to suits, dresses, or skirts. My style preference resembled the clothing that some Black masculine lesbians favored, which led some people to believe that I identified as butch (Swarr 2012a). My habitual silence as I observed meetings and my tendency to offer to get others coffee were behaviors that some interpreted as consistent with a femme demeanor (|Khaxas 2005; Kheswa 2005). Constituents typically did not attribute my silence to my work observing LGBT movement activities. No one asked me directly about my gender identification, but this may have mattered little to constituents. Speculating about another person’s gender identity involved LGBT persons in the process of identity work, actions that generated meanings about self- or group identity (Reger, Myers, and Einwohner 2008).

During my fieldwork, I noticed that there was little transgender identity talk, an example of identity work. Identity talk refers to the process of individu-als producing and refining knowledge about a particular group, and defining the boundaries of group membership (Lichterman 1999, 133). Identity talk entails collective discussion about a group, which, in turn, can influence how individuals understand their own identity and group membership. Typically,

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those involved in identity talk are members of the group subject to identity talk, but in some cases, people generate ideas and information about a group to which they do not belong. Discerning the absence of transgender identity talk prompted me to examine the silences around and sporadic mention of transgen-der identities, persons, and grievances in Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations. In this article, I analyze episodes in which identity talk about transgender persons and activists occurred (or could have occurred) or when questions about gender variance emerged in interactions involving LGBT activists and constituents. Relying upon episodes of identity talk to understand transgender invisibility creates several limitations: first, because transgender identity talk occurred infrequently, there were fewer episodes to parse for meaning; second, as I rely upon data I gathered during 2005–06, my analysis does not track changes in transgender visibility within these Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations over time.

Transgender Invisibility as a Movement Problem and Reality

The invisibility of transgender activists, leaders, and issues concerned activists working for LGBT rights in Namibia and South Africa. In October 2005, at a national meeting of South African LGBT movement organizations in Johan-nesburg, a Black lesbian staff member representing Behind the Mask expressed unease about the invisibility of bisexual, transgender, and intersex persons and issues in the strategic priorities of movement organizations claiming to represent them. She brought up this point after attending a bisexuality workshop for women during LGBT Pride week the previous month and discovering that a number of lesbians displayed “disgust” toward bisexuality, particularly toward bisexual women.5 For the Behind the Mask representative, the intolerance toward bisexu-ality “says something about understanding in these communities.” She asked LGBT movement organizations to work with constituents on eliminating intoler-ance toward other gender and sexual minorities in their own communities. Lewis, a white male representative of the Synergos Institute, a philanthropic NGO promoting social justice in the global South that helped convene this national meeting of activists, introduced a caveat. While he agreed that it was important to educate lesbian and gay constituents about bisexual, transgender, and intersex persons, he warned activists about the “paternalism” associated with speaking for others who had not spoken yet. Careful not to dictate to LGBT activists how the institute wanted them to pursue political activities, Lewis pointed out that bisexual, transgender, and intersex constituents had not organized themselves yet. While the Behind the Mask representative sympathized with Lewis’s point, she was concerned that misunderstanding contributed to the invisibility of bisexual, transgender, and intersex persons within South African LGBT move-ment organizations; she supported educating lesbian and gay constituents about bisexual, transgender, and intersex experiences.

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One explanation for transgender invisibility at this time is that the suprem-acy of lesbian and gay collective identities in the Namibian and South African LGBT movements displaced bisexual and transgender collective identities, rendering these identities unimaginable to many constituents as personal iden-tities. For some Namibian and South African LGBT activists, lesbian and gay already represented the gender variance that transgender identities were meant to capture, thus making transgender collective identity “invisible.” To be clear, I am not suggesting that gender-variant constituents were invisible; instead, I am pointing out that because few constituents used transgender identities, these identities were invisible in LGBT activist organizations.

Some Black and mixed-race Namibian and South African lesbians inter-preted their gender identities through their sexual desires. Duduzile, a Black lesbian and FEW member, described how some Black lesbians believed they were men: “[S]ome . . . will think that they are straight [men]. . . . They don’t really know” (Currier 2012c, 57). Simangele, a Black lesbian and FEW member, observed that because Black lesbians are attracted to women, “in the township, [lesbians] are men.”6 Karla, a mixed-race Namibian lesbian and TRP member, explained that some lesbians’ identification as men stemmed from local het-eronormative arrangements: “[T]he thinking that people have is if you are a lesbian, you are actually a woman who wants to be a man, you know. And so many times they can’t think of a lesbian that’s wearing a dress. They say, ‘No, it can’t be—it’s not true because a lesbian is a woman that wants to be a man.’ ”7 Within the local gender-sexual matrix, Black masculine women who sexually desired women were “men,” and “lesbian men” could function as a subcategory of men. Lesbian could operate simultaneously as a gender and sexual identity, preempting the possibility of some lesbian men identifying as transgender. Similarly, the local gender-sexual matrix did not recognize feminine women who desired women as lesbians; feminine women were “heterosexual” (Swarr 2012a).

I observed this identification process firsthand on a visit I made to a town-ship a half-hour east of Johannesburg with a FEW community representative. A prospective member hesitated in naming her/his gender and sexuality. Unsure of her/his gender and sexuality, s/he asked the representative, “Am I a man or a lesbian?” (Currier 2012c, 57). The community representative guided the que-rent to identify as lesbian, which would allow FEW to count more members as lesbians. FEW staff could then use their growing numbers of lesbian members to explain to donor agencies in the global North that their outreach programs to lesbians were effective. Although some observers might regard this inter-vention as driven primarily by financial motives, FEW’s ability to advocate for and offer social services to Black lesbians depended heavily on funding from Northern donors. Because FEW maintained an interest in publicly projecting an organizational identity committed to Black South African lesbians, com-munity representatives attempted to align constituents’ personal identities with the lesbian collective identity that FEW promoted.

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Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations often inter-vened in what might be called constituents’ gender misapprehensions. Through identity workshops, FEW staff sought to alter Black lesbian members’ under-standings of gender- and sexual-identity categories “to really make them aware that they are not men . . . [T]hey are women at the end of the day.”8 These interventions thwarted constituents’ cross-gender identifications and realigned their personal gender and sexual identifications within a dichotomous frame-work that separated gender from sexuality. Before joining FEW, Thandiswa, a Black lesbian and FEW staff member, believed that she “was just a tomboy. . . . I didn’t know the basics of being lesbian, but yes, they [FEW] told me” (Currier 2012c, 58). Expressing gratitude for FEW’s intervention in her personal sexual identification, Thandiswa replaced her tomboy identity with a lesbian one. Like other constituents, she did not question how FEW staff perceived the separability of gender- and sexual-identity categories.

Namibian and South African LGBT activists also used the idea of homopho-bia to frame hostility directed toward gender- and sexually diverse persons. As a concept, homophobia sidelined interpretations of such hostility as aggression toward gender nonconformity and enforced the distinction between gender and sexuality in movement organizations. Homophobia kept activists focused on hostility toward sexual diversity, even though hostility toward gender transgres-sion was evident in attacks on Black masculine lesbians and Black feminine gay men forced to expose their genitals to attackers to confirm their sex as male, female, or intersex (Swarr 2009). Similar hostility motivated the “corrective” rape of Black South African lesbians (Muholi 2004). Sibusiso, a Black lesbian and Behind the Mask staff member, explained how Black lesbians were “raped everyday only because they are lesbian women, and those men believe that, ‘Okay, I’ll change her to be straight’ ” by raping her.9 Perpetrators punished Black lesbians for taking sexually available women away from them, for not being sexually available themselves, and for being gender transgressive (Swarr 2012a). Black masculine lesbians were especially vulnerable to violence due to their visible gender variance. LGBT activists tended to emphasize constituents’ sexual nonconformity as putting them at risk for violence, instead of framing this violence as trying to punish gender transgression.

However, some LGBT activists were beginning to link hostility toward gender variance to aggression punishing sexual transgression. Lindiwe, a Black lesbian and FEW member, described how using public bathrooms could be an ordeal for Black masculine lesbians. She narrated a hypothetical situation involving a Black masculine lesbian who visited a health clinic because she was experiencing genitourinary pain: “They [may] need to do a urine test. When you’re supposed to go to the girls’ toilet, they’ll [the nurses] tell you, ‘No, no. Sorry, you are in the wrong toilet. Go that side [to the men’s toilet].’ You tell them, ‘I’m a girl.’ They say, ‘You look like a man. Why are you dressed like a man? You’re not supposed to be dressed like that.’ ”10 In this scenario, the nurse

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first regulates who can use the bathroom. She becomes suspicious when she sees a “man” trying to use the women’s bathroom. After the hypothetical lesbian confirms her female sexed body, the nurse ridicules her masculine appearance. According to Lindiwe, gender regulation can quickly metamorphose into an explosion of moral outrage. “Some [nurses] will even . . . stoop to preaching to you. . . . ‘You are sick. [W]hat you need is treatment . . . You should go home.’ ” The hypothetical nurse verifies that the woman is “sick,” but the nurse cannot treat the patient’s “illness,” which the nurse deems is psychopathological. The hypothetical Black masculine lesbian becomes alienated by this discrimina-tion and will “end up not getting [treated] because you get irritated during the process.” The nurse draws attention to the hypothetical lesbian’s gender nonconformity as a social ailment by “talk[ing] aloud so that everyone sees [you as] this monster or alien. And then you just feel out of place, and you just leave your file there and go home.” The hypothetical woman becomes so nervous and upset by how the nurse treats her because of her gender presentation that she would prefer to forgo treatment than be further humiliated.

Lindiwe narrated this scenario melodramatically, but her demeanor cap-tured the acute exclusion that Black masculine lesbians may experience when facing intense scrutiny because of their visible gender nonconformity. Despite her detailed, inventive account, during my ethnographic observations, Namib-ian and South African LGBT activists did not explicitly cast the violence and discrimination that gender-nonconforming lesbians and gay men experienced as motivated by hostility toward gender variance. Although there was growing awareness among LGBT activists of how hegemonic accounts of heteronorma-tivity isolated gender-variant Namibians and South Africans, in the mid-2000s movement organizations tended to treat “corrective rape,” for instance, first as an anti-lesbian (homophobic) act, and second as a misogynistic act of violence against women.

Together with the supremacy of lesbian and gay identities, the interpre-tive framework of homophobia contributed to the invisibility of transgender as a deployable identity category for some constituents. For an identity to be “deployable” within a social movement context, it must resonate culturally with movement constituents and serve as an instrument of movement mobilization, inspiring constituents to join the movement (Bernstein and Olsen 2009). In such cases, some constituents realign their personal identities to match collec-tive identities. However, if other identities compete for constituents’ attention, constituents may not select available collective identities as personal identities. Within the context of collective-identity production in the Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations I observed during the mid-2000s, gender transgression became subsumed within lesbian and gay identities. Constituents gravitated toward lesbian and gay personal-identity terms and eschewed the possibility of identifying as transgender, thus contributing to the gulf between transgender collective and personal identities.

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Normalizing Transgender

In March 2006 at a national meeting of South African LGBT movement orga-nizations, activists pledged to recruit more transgender and bisexual persons as members and activists. A white woman representative from a recently launched, autonomous transgender movement organization, Gender DynamiX, volun-teered to help them recruit transgender persons.11 A motivation to recruit diverse constituents also guided Namibian activists. TRP staff decided to pursue public education about gender and sexual identities through workshops for members and a weekly radio show, “Talking Pink.” The show’s producers wanted to reduce the cultural indeterminacy of gender- and sexual-collective-identity categories for listeners by broadcasting interviews with LGBT persons and information about gender and sexual diversity. Mary, a Black lesbian and TRP staff member, explained that most Namibians were “confused and . . . [didn’t] understand the different terminologies of homosexuality and . . . sexual identities.”12 This “confusion,” to use Mary’s terminology, seemed to stem in part from activists’ preference for LGBT identity nomenclature.

The producers of “Talking Pink” hoped that the show would disseminate collective-identity categories that gender and sexual minority listeners would adopt as personal-identity categories. This process exemplifies Namibian and South African LGBT activists’ dependence on logics of recognition and homo-geneity. Activists expected constituents’ personal-identification modes to emu-late what they observed in LGBT movement organizations’ collective-identity strategies. For instance, Andrew, a Black gay man who worked for Behind the Mask, affirmed that the public visibility of LGBT movement organizations encouraged gender and sexual dissidents to embrace LGBT collective identities as personal identities, saying that

I don’t think people make a conscious effort to come out just because there’s a Behind the Mask or just because there’s a FEW. But I think it does help when they see that there is [an organization like] FEW. They see that there are hundreds of other Black lesbians just like them, or they see that there are hundreds of other transgender people that live sort of “normal” lives and stuff so I think it helps. It perhaps plants the seed within that person.13

Andrew’s narrative suggests that eventually the hypothetical African observer will be ready to disclose her gender or sexual identity to others. In this sense, for activists, an LGBT movement organization’s presence facilitated the public emergence of discrete constituencies, including lesbians, gay men, bisexual persons, and transgender persons. Activists affirmed that the public presence of LGBT activist organizations prepared constituents to assume collective identities as personal identities. When constituents were “ready,” according to Andrew, “I can be normal like Andrew, whatever that means or normal like [another activist they want to emulate].” The “seeds” of new personal identities

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lay within the collective-identity possibilities that LGBT activist organizations modeled for constituents.

“Talking Pink” provided TRP with a platform to translate the movement’s collective identities into lived personal identities. According to Mary, the show had a “big impact” on Namibians, as evidenced by the diversity of callers and their views. In early episodes, Black Namibians dominated the show’s on-air callers, but in 2006, as she explained, “the white community [and] the colored [mixed-race] community” began to call and “air their views. . . . [I]t is a clear indication that people are listening. We have elders that call in to our show and speak about these things [and make] comments even if they’re negative, but that’s the whole dynamic of the show—for people to have different opin-ions.”14 Sylvia, a Black lesbian and TRP staff member, disliked the anti-LGBT statements that callers sometimes made, but she expressed pride that anti-LGBT opponents still listened to the show.15 In spite of the show’s popularity and efficacy in educating people about sexual diversity, few people knew what transgender meant.

The producers of “Talking Pink” decided to produce their first show on transgender identities and experiences in 2004. Mary noted that the episode represented “the first time” that the show featured “somebody who wants to go for a sex change and who’s so confident and . . . has done [her] homework.”16 The producers wanted to feature guests who would help TRP generate and circulate positive information about gender and sexual minorities in Namibia. The show on transgender issues was so successful that Katutura Community Radio, the radio station that broadcast and produced “Talking Pink,” received an award for its program “on being transgender in Namibia” (Frank and |Khaxas 2006, 85).

On a later installment of “Talking Pink,” which aired in 2006, a preopera-tive, male-to-female transgender woman, Serena, called TRP and volunteered to participate in an interview with the host and TRP’s director about her gender identity.17 In this episode, Namibian LGBT activists constructed gender- and sexual-identity categories as mutually exclusive; however, they entertained com-plexity in their discussion of these discrete categories. In a conversation with the host, who was a Black lesbian, at the beginning of the show, the director of TRP recognized how little Namibians understood about gender and sexuality:

Host: [Serena’s] not comfortable in terms of explaining herself [her gender and sexuality] to people. How do you see that? The term gay is more commonly used; it’s more commonly understood. So what is your point of view on that?TRP director: I think that only now are people really beginning to under-stand the issue of being gay. As we know, there’s a lot less tolerance towards bisexual people. And at the moment there’s no understanding of transgender issues at all. And I can imagine what an incredibly difficult time it must be explaining to people what it means to be transgender.

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The visibility of gay identities had been on the rise since 1997, when TRP first emerged to counter state leaders’ hostility toward homosexuality (Currier 2012a). Within the last few years, Namibian gay men and lesbians felt comfort-able and safe enough to come out publicly and talk openly about their lives on “Talking Pink” and in Namibian print, electronic, and televisual media. How-ever, bisexual and transgender identities remained invisible to the Namibian public. TRP’s director suggested that being visible equated to being understood; if Namibians could see, hear, talk to, or read about people who identified as gay or lesbian, then they could understand the experiences of gay men and lesbians. Yet this was not the case for bisexual and transgender persons, whose gender/sexuality did not correspond to a heterosexuality/homosexuality dichotomy, which ordinary Namibians were beginning to understand and tolerate, in the opinion of the director.

Given heteronormative social and political arrangements in Namibia, a person who visibly deviated from dichotomous gender and sexual categories was at risk for violence (Lorway 2008). According to TRP’s director,

research has shown that transgender people, of all the [gender and] sexual minorities, experience the most violence from outside towards them, and that an incredible [amount] of violence that transgender people face come from families of people that are close to them. So those are just shocking figures. And, you know, with the odds stacked against you like that, who would you want to share the fact with that you are transgender?

The director acknowledged that gender-variant persons might not identify publicly as transgender in light of the potential for violence and rejection from their families. Despite the hazards that could accompany disclosure of one’s gender-variant subjectivities to others, TRP’s director treated transgender as an available personal-identity category for gender-variant individuals.

During the show, the director continued to interrogate stable gender- and sexual-identity categories, although the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy remained in place. He asserted that

I think that more people should be confused about their sexuality, including heterosexual people. There’s no such thing as a neat little box in which you fit as a heterosexual person, or I fit as a gay person or Serena fits as a transgender person. And so I’m really surprised that there aren’t more people that would acknowledge the fact that they are confused. . . . So there’s nothing wrong with being confused about your sexuality. I do think the old issue that bisexual or transgender people specifically are confused is completely nonsense. I do feel that bisexual and transgender people go through a much more difficult time coming to terms and identifying accurately what their sexuality is. But I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there is so little understanding of bisexuality and being transgender in our communities.

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TRP’s director acknowledged the relative newness of transgender and bisexu-ality as identity categories for Namibians. Even though he stated that it was “nonsense” to believe that bisexual and transgender persons were more “con-fused” than heterosexuals, LGBT persons might have trouble expressing their gender and sexual identities to other Namibians who understood gender and sexuality dichotomously, which was a byproduct of colonial and apartheid domination (McClintock 1995). In this way, the legacy of racial injustice intersected with and buttressed persisting gender and sexual inequalities in the present.

Access to medical treatment emerged as a transgender concern in this episode of “Talking Pink.” The host and the director focused much attention on Serena’s interest in obtaining medical treatment. In response to the host’s query about the meaning of transgender, TRP’s director provided the following description. This is “more than just wanting to become [the opposite gender]—it’s what they are. You know, a transgender person is the opposite sex except that he or she has the wrong body assigned to them. . . . And it is a matter of a boy being in a girl’s body or a girl being in a boy’s body.” Living in the “wrong body” emerged as a possible normalizing narrative for transgender-identified Namibians, even though the wrong-body narrative would not encompass all gender-variant persons’ feelings (Crawford 2008, 132). In response to the host’s question about whether she had thought of having surgery to complete her gender transition, Serena indicated she had, although the prohibitive cost and lack of health-insurance coverage for these procedures had led her to postpone treatment. The director explained that Serena would be unable to obtain adequate care for her gender transition in Namibia. He recommended that she head to neighboring South Africa for medical care if she had the finan-cial resources, which was not the situation of most gender-variant persons in Namibia and South Africa (Currier 2012c; Lorway 2008; Swarr 2012b). In the interest of educating the audience, the host asked the director to explain the intricacies of gender-reassignment surgery for male-to-female (MTF) transgender persons. Explicating “psychological evaluations,” “liv[ing] as a woman for two years,” “hormonal treatment,” “the construction of a vagina,” and “secondary operations,” he skillfully related the complex technical details of medicalized gender transitions to the host and listeners.

To some transgender-identified Namibians, medical procedures were unap-pealing. An MTF transgender woman named Louami interviewed by Lorway (2006) rejected TRP’s representation of transgender experiences, saying that “[t]hey were telling me at the [TRP] office that I am transgender but I will never have the operation! I like how I look” (443). Louami’s rejection of undergoing a medicalized gender transition challenged the nascent understanding of the transgender personal identity that TRP advanced on the radio show. Although “Talking Pink” may have provided listeners with educational information, how the host and TRP director explicated gender variance may have led listeners

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to expect that transgender persons’ interests lay primarily in gaining access to medical care related to gender transitions. Access to adequate medical treat-ment may be a major concern for some transgender-identified persons, but it need not be the only or primary issue. The conflation of gender-variant persons’ experiences and grievances with medicalized gender transitions could lead some constituents to distance themselves from transgender identities because they were not interested in medicalized gender transitions. Featuring Serena as a representative transgender person might have led Namibian listeners to develop a narrow, normalized understanding of transgender persons’ concerns, which is a risk of misrepresenting a constituency in formation.

The conversion of collective identities into personal identities that con-stituents could seize relied upon a process of normalization whereby identity categories became more accessible to constituents (Currier 2010; Lorway 2008). LGBT movement organizations in Namibia and South Africa used educational workshops that taught constituents about gender- and sexual-identity terminol-ogy; in turn, these workshops normalized different collective-identity categories, including that of transgender. In other words, these workshops modeled col-lective identities as personal identities. When discussing TRP’s organizational activities, Davis, a Black gay man and TRP member, recalled the organization’s mobilization for World AIDS Day each December. TRP sponsored workshops for constituents who wanted to learn about safer-sex practices. In particular, some constituents felt that “they don’t really get education out of other organizations because they don’t really talk about gay issues. They don’t mention lesbian sex for instance. They don’t talk about man-to-man sex. So that’s where we come in and talk about it openly, publicly.”18 These discussions not only acquainted constituents with different sexual practices, but also with LGBT collective identities. This is evident when Davis mentions that facilitators of safer-sex workshops discussed “being transgender. We talk about bisexuality” when covering a range of sexual practices in which people with different gender and sexual identities might engage.

Activists anchored discussions of diverse sexual practices in the LGBT acronym. Sexual practices existed in relation to identity categories. Work-shops relied upon and reproduced constructions of stable, mutually exclusive gender- and sexual-identity categories by encouraging workshop attendees to “understand themselves and . . . their bodies” through these identity categories. Davis continued: “A lot of people are still confused about themselves. They don’t understand why they act like this. They have that self-hatred. So we try to help them to make that peace with themselves first [in safer-sex and identity workshops].” Normalization involved activist intervention in constituents’ identification processes. Attending a workshop could reshape constituents’ personal-identification processes, such that they began to embrace stable gender and sexual identities that they could disclose to others as personal identities. For activists, normalizing collective-identity categories as personal-identity

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categories was a necessary condition for promoting transgender identities and grievances alongside lesbian and gay identities and concerns.

Contemporary Transgender Advocacy in Namibia and South Africa

Since 2006, a growing number of Namibian and South African transgender persons have been speaking for themselves, defining the content of their per-sonal and collective identities, and organizing autonomously, evidenced in the formation of groups like the Trans Activist Movement of Namibia (TAMON) in 2010 and Gender DynamiX in 2005, S.H.E in 2005, and Transgender and Intersex Africa in 2010 in South Africa (Husakouskaya 2013; Le Roux 2012; Morgan, Marais, and Wellbeloved 2010; Swarr 2012b; Theron 2011; Thoreson 2013; Vincent and Camminga 2009). Gender DynamiX’s advocacy has garnered the organization a public profile as a respected African movement organization. In 2009, it mobilized against anti-lesbian rape, linking such rape to intolerance for gender nonconformity. The organization cited the case of Caster Semenya, a Black South African woman athlete who was the focus of intense public speculation about her sex/gender identity, as an example of the physical and verbal violence to which Black, gender-variant South Africans were subjected (Dworkin, Swarr, and Cooky 2013, 55).

Autonomous transgender advocacy has also become transnational in scope (Thoreson 2013). Within Namibia, Out-Right Namibia, a national LGBT activist organization that fills the void left by TRP’s closure, advocates for trans-gender and gender-variant constituents in the country. Over the last few years, TAMON and Out-Right Namibia have supported efforts to strengthen trans-gender and intersex advocacy in southern Africa (Miyanicwe 2012). Gender DynamiX facilitated the launch of Transitioning Africa, a continental orga-nization promoting the interests of intersex, transgender, and gender-atypical Africans (Thoreson 2013). Its investment in Transitioning Africa indicates a move toward supporting continental/regional organizing that can nurture budding transgender activism throughout Africa.

Currently, Gender DynamiX leads a program assisting African transgender and gender-variant persons in obtaining refugee status in South Africa. The program helps transgender and gender-variant persons “navigate the refugee, asylum, and immigration system, open bank accounts, [and] get access to medical care” (654). Notable among the transgender persons that Gender DynamiX has helped resettle in South Africa is Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a Malawian transgender woman (ANP/AFP 2012). In 2010, Chimbalanga was convicted in Malawi under the antisodomy law for having same-sex sex with her partner, Steven Monjeza. Both Chimbalanga and Monjeza were each sen-tenced to fourteen years in prison (Nkhoma-Somba 2010). The state treated Chimbalanga as a man, the gender she was assigned at birth, and ignored her self-identification as a woman. Nine days after their sentencing in May 2010

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Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika pardoned the couple at the behest of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was visiting Malawi at the time (Mlenga 2012). Chimbalanga fled Malawi due to the persecution she received related to her arrest and conviction. Since resettling in South Africa, she has worked as an intern at Gender DynamiX and Iranti-Org (Pereira 2013), a “queer human rights visual media organization” in South Africa (Iranti-Org 2013). Although activists characterize Chimbalanga’s ongoing integration into South Africa as successful, the news media report that since her arrival in the country she has been attacked on two separate occasions and evicted by an intolerant landlord (Iob 2013).

In addition to autonomous transgender organizing, Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations have launched projects targeting transgender-identified and gender-variant constituents. Liesl Theron (2013), a cofounder of Gender DynamiX, applauds organizations’ newfound interest in transgender programming, which could generate new visibility for gender-variant persons within LGBT organizing. The timing of new transgender pro-grams coincided with Northern donors’ interest in funding transgender projects, creating the impression that, by quickly creating programs for transgender constituents, “opportunistic organisations [are] scrambling for much needed funds” (319). Hence, some observers might cynically ascribe transgender pro-grams’ existence to LGBT movement organizations’ desperate efforts to remain financially solvent, and “wonder how good” the programs will be “if they are (only) financially motivated” and if organizations do not recruit transgender persons to run them (ibid.). Although dismissing new transgender programs as camouflaged attempts by LGBT activist organizations to obtain donor fund-ing is tempting, Theron advises observers to remember that hastily assembled programs might be better than the alternative: no services or resources for transgender and gender-variant constituents. Southern African LGBT move-ment organizations still struggle to represent and reach transgender-identified and gender-variant constituents.

Conclusion

My analysis of transgender invisibility in Namibian and South African LGBT organizing raises questions about activists’ roles in imagining and manufactur-ing constituencies by expecting that promoting certain collective identities would realign constituents’ personal identities. Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations’ proactive inclusion of transgender identity and grievances seems to constitute “speaking for” this group (Alcoff 1995). Although previous research examines how and why some US lesbian and gay movement organizations were slow to respond to demands for transgender inclusion by autonomous transgender activists (Armstrong 2002; Gamson 1995), little research documents what happens when movements proactively include

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constituencies that have not asked to be incorporated. Amy Stone’s (2009) research on US lesbian and gay activists’ inclusion of transgender identity and gender diversity in local nondiscrimination ordinances in Michigan is one of the few studies to broach this subject. She explores how lesbian and gay activ-ists represented the interests of transgender persons, even though there was little input from transgender-identified activists. Proactive inclusion rendered transgender persons, experiences, and grievances incompletely.

The cases of Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations that I present offer a different vantage point from which to view transgender inclusion. First, in the LGBT movement organizations I follow, transgender inclusion unfolded in a top-down fashion, with more senior activists encourag-ing constituents and recruits to adopt collective identities as personal identi-ties. Activists did not first recruit transgender-identified constituents to join their organizations, instead expecting that such constituents would join later. Activists implicitly assumed that over time gender-variant constituents would align their personal gender identities with the transgender collective-identity category contained within the LGBT acronym. Second, activists engaged in identity work to normalize transgender as a personal identity that constituents would elect to adopt. This research emphasizes how the gap between collective and personal identities contributes to transgender invisibility in Namibian and South African LGBT organizing.

Publicly representing transgender in activist organizations involves ren-dering culturally intelligible the boundaries, interests, and experiences of transgender persons to interlocutors, hence fixing the boundaries of a trans-gender constituency and collective identity (Butler 2006). Such fixing risks normalizing and privileging collective-identity categories as templates for how gender-variant persons should use personal-identity categories that correspond to collective-identity categories. In this regard, individuals may measure their gendered subjectivities against a movement-generated index of gender expres-sion and identity. A transgender collective identity may metamorphose into a hegemonic, widely disseminated understanding of what transgender means and who transgender persons are. In the future, experts, including activists, in the global South could use hegemonic categories to adjudicate whether individuals are “educated” about gender and sexuality terminology (Valentine 2007). In these cases, leaders may grant constituents who exhibit expertise with LGBT terminology greater access to movement resources and leadership positions than those perceived to be in need of education about movement identities, prac-tices, and goals. Although the Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations I observed did not use constituents’ personal identities as a way to determine in what activities constituents could participate, some staff members decided which constituents needed to attend identity workshops. Activists sought to influence constituents’ modes of personal identification, molding them subtly in ways that conformed to collective-identity categories. However, some

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constituents used prevailing lesbian and gay collective identities to capture their lived gender nonconformity, resisting the transgender appellation.

Transgender invisibility may be a temporary phase through which some LGBT movements travel. In Namibian and South African LGBT movement organizations, such invisibility was not a sign of activists’ deficient commit-ment to democratic inclusion and diversity; in fact, activists fiercely defended the integration and involvement of transgender and gender-variant constitu-ents in movement activities (Currier 2010). Transgender invisibility signaled a transitional phase of movement development. As constituents became drawn to alternative modes of personal gender and sexual identification, some gravitated toward transgender personal identities, and leveraged these identities into a bottom-up, organic process of mobilizing other transgender-identified Namibian and South African persons. Interpreting transgender invisibility as a result of movement growth and a gap between collective and personal identities urges observers to pause and consider the possible sources of this invisibility. Instead of assuming that lesbian and gay activists actively excluded gender-nonconforming constituents from movement campaigns, this analysis encourages scholars to reevaluate the meanings of transgender invisibility in different national contexts.

Acknowledgments

The National Science Foundation (SES-0601767), the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, the University of Pittsburgh, and Texas A&M University supported this research. I would like to thank Kathleen Blee, Furaha Norton, Valerie Weinstein, and the anonymous reviewers at Feminist Formations for their insightful, constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Ashley Currier is an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati. She studies gender- and sexual-diversity organizing in southern and West Africa. She is the author of Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa (2012), and her research has appeared in Gender & Society; Mobilization; Politique Africaine; Qualitative Sociology; Signs; Studies in Law, Politics, and Society; and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her current research traces how the politicization of homosexuality in Malawi affects different social movements and gender and sexual dissidents. She can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. I treat transgender as an umbrella term for gender variance that includes people in-between gender-identity categories and “those who defy [gender] categories” (Swarr 2012b, 4).

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2. Not all US transgender activists aspire to join lesbian and gay movement orga-nizations; many have launched autonomous transgender activist organizations (Broad 2002; Davidson 2007).

3. I was unable to record this meeting using a digital voice recorder. I only had permission from meeting attendees to take detailed ethnographic field notes.

4. Although intersex advocacy in South Africa has expanded recently (Husakous-kaya 2013; Klein 2009), intersex organizing was nascent in Namibia and South Africa in 2005 and 2006. One of the few instances of intersex-identity talk that I observed occurred at the October 2005 meeting of the Joint Working Group in Johannesburg, South Africa.

5. Field notes, October 19, 2005.6. Simangele, interview with the author, February 8, 2006, Johannesburg.7. Karla, interview with the author, May 15, 2006, Windhoek, Namibia.8. Comments of Fundiswa, Black lesbian and FEW member, February 17, 2006,

Johannesburg.9. Sibusiso, interview with the author, November 28, 2005, Johannesburg.

10. Lindiwe, interview with the author, February 14, 2006, Johannesburg.11. Field notes, March 3, 2006.12. Mary, interview with the author, July 6, 2006, Windhoek, Namibia.13. Andrew, interview with the author, October 31, 2005, Johannesburg.14. Mary, interview.15. Sylvia, interview with the author, May 11, 2006, Windhoek, Namibia.16. Mary, interview.17. I use a pseudonym for the guest on “Talking Pink” in keeping with the principle

of anonymity that I used with interview participants.18. Davis, interview with the author, 17 May 2006, Windhoek, Namibia.

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Transgender Invisibility in Namibian and South African LGBT Organizing

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